Empowerment as Predictor of Organizational Role Stress among Bank and Insurance Personnel

Ajai Pratap Singh* Abstract

This study examines the impact of empowerment on organisational role stress. Based on a sample size of 120, the results depicted empowerment as being negatively and significantly related with organisational role stress. The findings have implications for managing and regulating organisational role stress.

----------------------------------------------------------------------*Senior Lecturer , Dept. of Applied Psychology, VBS Purvanchal University Jaunpur,UP India Email- ajaisingh27@yahoo.com

Introduction
Modern life is full of stress. As organizations become more complex, the potential for stress increases. Urbanization, industrialization and increase in scale of operations are some of the reasons for rising stress. Stress is an inevitable consequence of socioeconomic complexity and, to some extent, its stimulant as well. People experience stress, as they can no longer have complete control over what happens in their lives. Being no escape from stress in modem life, we need to find ways of using stress productively, and reducing dysfunctional stress. In recent years, the concept of empowerment has become a buzzword in management circles and gained prominence as an individual level initiative to counter stress. Its origins are in issues raised in the era of employee involvement symbolized by participative management, managerial practices such as employee self management, and sharing power and responsibility with team members.

Employee Empowerment
One of the most frequently referenced definitions of employee empowerment is that offered by Conger and Kanungo (1988). They define empowerment as a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy among organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster powerlessness, and through their removal by both formal organizational practices and informal techniques of proving efficacy information. This definition implies strengthening the effort-to-performance expectancy or increasing employee feeling of self-efficacy. According to Conger and Kanungo, the effect of empowerment is the initiation and persistence of behavior by empowered employees to accomplish task objectives. This definition is rooted in management theory of power and authority delegation

that gives an employee the right to control and use organizational resources to bring about desired organizational outcomes. Thomas and Velthouse (1990), however, argued that the concept of empowerment is much more complex and could not be fully explained in a one dimensional construct such as self-efficacy. They therefore define empowerment as an intrinsic task motivation that manifests itself in four cognitions (meaningfulness, competence, impact and choice or selfdetermination), reflecting an individuals orientation to his or her work roles. By intrinsic task motivation, they mean, a positively valued experiences that an individual derives directly from a task that produces motivation and satisfaction. Meaningfulness is the value of the task goal or purpose in relation to the individuals own ideals or standards, and competence is the degree to which a person can perform task activities skillfully. Impact, on the other hand, is the degree to which behavior is seen as making a difference in terms of accomplishing the purpose of the task, while choice or self-determination is the causal responsibility for a persons actions. It reflects independence in the initiation and continuation of work behavior and processes (Deci, Connell, and Ryan, 1989). Employee empowerment literature identifies contextual factors and strategies that promote and support empowerment. For example, Burke (1986) suggests that a way to empower employees is to express confidence in them together with establishing realistic high performance expectations for them. Block (1987) adds the creation of opportunities for employees to participate in decision making, and giving employees

autonomy from bureaucratic constraints as empowerment strategies. Comparatively, Benis and Nanus (1985) suggest the setting of performance

objectives for employees that are challenging and inspiring. Also, Oldham (1976), Kanter (1979), Strauss (1977), Hackman and Oldham (1975) suggest performance-based reward systems and enriched jobs that provide autonomy and control, task identity, opportunities for career advancement and task meaningfulness as ways to empower employees. At the organizational level, however, McClelland (1975) and House (1988) suggest that empowerment could be achieved through employee selection and training programs designed to provide required technical skills together with a culture which encourages self-determination and collaboration instead of competition. A practical and process oriented definition of empowerment was offered by Bowen and Lawler (1992). They define employee empowerment as sharing with front-line employees, information about an organizations performance, information about rewards based on the organizations performance, knowledge that enables employees to understand and contribute to organizational performance, and giving employees the power to make decisions that influence organizational direction and performance.

Role Stress
Role stress occurs in employee jobs that involve direct customer contact whether in the context of a face-to-face or a telephone service encounter (Babin & Boles, 1996; Brown & Peterson, 1993; Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964) has identified role conflict and role ambiguity as the two key components of role stress. Role conflict has been defined as the simultaneous occurrence of two (or more) sets of pressures such that compliance with one would make more difficult compliance with the other (Kahn et al., 1964, p. 19). For personnel, expectations of the organization, the supervisor or team leaders stressing operational efficiency may clash with the demands of customers who want problem resolution or satisfaction.

In many instances supervisors focus on technology to speed up the process of customer interaction, not realizing that a critical element of call center employee performance is the level of satisfaction based on meeting customer expectations. Furthermore, modern organisations are typically a setting in which electronic performance monitoring takes place, and recent empirical work has shown that this is a major factor of job stress (Aiello & Kolb, 1995; Silverman & Smith, 1995). Role ambiguity occurs when a person does not have access to sufficient information to perform his or her role as a service employee adequately (Walker, Churchill, & Ford, 1975). Role ambiguity may result when the employee is uncertain about the supervisory expectations or when they do not know how their performance will be evaluated. The antecedents of role stress (role ambiguity and role conflict) are clearly established in the literature. Empowerment, competence, and leadership have been found to affect role stress. Empirical research on the relationship between empowerment and role stress is both scarce and mixed (Bowen and Lawler 1995). Empirical work has established a negative relationship between empowerment and role stress (ambiguity and conflict). The greater the perceived empowerment the less the role stress. Two dimensions of empowerment have been identified: (1) competence and (2) authority (Chiles & Zorn, 1995; Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Spreitzer, 1995). Competence is an employees belief in the capability to perform job related activities with skill, whereas authority reflects autonomy in the initiation and continuation of work behavior and processes. Employees that experience a work-specific sense of competence are more likely to assume an active orientation with regard to their work and hence will experience lower levels of role stress (Gist & Mitchell, 1992). Autonomous employees feel that they

have the responsibility and the power to make things happen. Many operational aspects of a modern organization actually create pressures that reduce the probability of employees to feel empowered. In many industries there has been a strong emphasis on the role that information technology plays in guiding employees through customer interactions, by selecting the appropriate path for them to follow through so-called screen pops containing communication scripts. This closely resembles the production line approach to service delivery that has been effectively used in the fastfood business (Bowen & Lawler, 1995). However, in many organizations, employees have to deal with unusual and unexpected situations in which the strong emphasis on rules and regulations of the scripted approach lacks the required flexibility and discretionary behavior needed to satisfy customers. The rigid focus on technology may lead to role stress (Schaufeli, Keijsers, & Miranda, 1995). Empowered employees are free to fine-tune service regulations contained in scripts in order to meet or exceed customer expectations. Hartline and Ferrell (1996) report a direct positive relationship between empowerment (operationalized as tolerance of freedom) and role conflict and report an indirect positive effect of empowerment on role ambiguity. This is explained by the fact that empowerment may increase uncertainty because there are fewer standards or procedures that can be used as guidelines by employees. Objectives This study has been designed to investigate the relationships as well as the contribution of empowerment dimensions on organisational role stress in the Indian context. It has the following objectives: 1. To investigate the relationships between organisational role stress. empowerment and

2. To find out the contribution/impact of empowerment on organisational role stress. Hypotheses It tests the following hypotheses: 1. There will be significant relationships between dimensions and organisational role empowerment stress.

2. The empowerment dimensions will significantly contribute to organisational role stress.

Method
Sample A sample of 120 employees (male = 112, female = 8) were selected by purposive sampling technique from 4 banks and 5 insurance companies (both private and public) in Utter Pradesh, India. The mean age of the participants was 38.31 years with a standard deviation of 10.41 ranging from 19 to 56 years. The average tenure of participants in their job positions was 12.99 years ranging from 1 to 31 years.

Tools
ORGANIZATIONAL ROLE STRESS SCALE (ORS) The organizational role stress scale (ORS) used was developed by Pareek (1997). The scale has a total of fifty items divided into ten dimensions and a total score. The ten dimensions of the ORS are: self role distance, inter- role distance, role stagnation, role isolation, role ambiguity, role expectation conflict, role overload, role erosion, resource inadequacy and personal inadequacy. It has a test-retest reliability coefficient of 0.73(Sen, 1981). Empowerment Scale

Empowerment was assessed using the instrument developed by Spreitzer (1995). Spreitzers measure, comprising four 3-item subscales, taps the em-

powerment

dimensions

of

meaning,

perceived

competence,

self-

determination and impact by asking respondents to indicate their degree of agreement, or disagreement, with 12 Likert-type statements. In the present study responses were recorded on a seven-point scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Alpha for a combined scale was .72 in an industrial sample and .62 in an insurance sample.

Results and Discussion

The major thrust of the present investigation was to study the relationship between empowerment and organizational role stress. Correlation analysis was used to measure the linear relationship between dependent and independent variables. Multiple regression analysis was used examine the relative impact of empowerment dimensions on organizational role stress. Table:1 Correlation between Empowerment Dimensions and Organizational Role Stress(N = 120)
SELF Variables MEANING COMPETENCE DETERMINATION MEANING 1 .671(**) .447(**) COMPETENCE 1 .553(**) SELF 1 DETERMINATION IMPACT ORGANIZATIONAL ROLE STRESS ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). ORGANISATIONAL ROLE STRESS -.277(**) -.524(**) -.344(**) -.461(**) 1

IMPACT .687(**) .552(**) .527(**) 1

The results in Table 1 depict the kind as well as the level of relationship between Empowerment dimensions and Organizational Role Stress. The correlation values between them are negative and all of them have been found to be significant. This indicates that empowerment level of the employees help them to get into a productive process of controlling and managing organizational role stress. To be more precise, competence, meaning, impact and self determination help in managing their own role

stress in more intelligent ways. These findings support the findings of past research. Earlier empirical works have also established a negative relationship between empowerment and role stress (ambiguity and conflict). The greater the perceived empowerment less the role stress. Two dimensions of empowerment have been identified: (1) competence and (2) authority (Chiles & Zorn, 1995; Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Spreitzer, 1995). Employees that experience a work-specific sense of competence are more likely to assume an active orientation with regard to their work and hence will experience lower levels of role stress (Gist & Mitchell, 1992). Table: 2 Impact of Empowerment on Organizational Role Stress (N = 120)
Predictors
COMPETENCE IMPACT MEANING

R
.524 .563 .612

R square
.274 .317 .375

R
.000 .043 .058

Beta
-.546 -.419 .377

t
-5.431 -4.091 3.268

Sig.
.000 .000 .001

Table 2 reveals that when the independent variables entered in the regression model with competence as a criterion, competence alone contributed 27.4% of the variance. A significant increase of 4.3% was obtained in R square when it was entered along with impact in the regression model accounting for 31.7 % of variance. A significant increase of 5.8% was obtained in R square when it was entered along with impact and meaning in the regression model accounting for 37.5 % of the variance when entered in the regression equation. It is clear from the table that competence makes the largest unique contribution ( beta= -.546), followed by impact (beta = -.419) and meaning (beta = .377).

The bank and insurance sector is a vibrant environment in which the employees must handle more transactions that have increasing complexity, with higher consumer expectations. In this environment, empowerment is clearly seen as influencing role stress. That is, not having the power to achieve solutions, solve problems, and answer questions is clearly stressful as a role issue. At the same time empowerment competence having the training and skills to answer the questions, solve the problems, feeling in control of anything that is and can be askedfeeds directly into job satisfaction and does not affect role stress. Implications These results also suggest a number of managerial implications. First of all, the empowerment seems to have a relatively strong impact in terms of role stress reduction. One important implication seems to allow employees the freedom to influence pace, working method, and sequence of tasks in dealing with customers. While an increase in autonomy could be implemented at the level of the individual employee, it has been shown that increasing autonomy at work-group level by means of self-management work teams significantly decreases employee role stress (Terra, 1995). Developing empowerment autonomy could be done at three levels: (1) strategic (i.e., general conditions of work, such as working hours, shift systems), (2) process (i.e., change processes such as service quality improvement by reducing response times), and (3) operational participation (planning , scheduling, determining standards). In stressful work environments, it has been emphasized that job rotation, whereby employees switch jobs and learn about different duties and responsibilities, and reinforcement of employees faith in their own competencies and skills are particularly useful in increasing job satisfaction.

Employee recognition by management as well as strengthening employees confidence in their competence through task-related training programs may be the key to keeping high-performance call center employees.

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